Shopping on 1, Sleeping on 2

By BRADFORD McKEE

Published: August 19, 2004

IN Lincoln Park, one of Chicago's more crowded and costly city neighborhoods, Tania and Scott Janos can shop as if they lived in the suburbs. There's the Bed Bath & Beyond on North Broadway, the Borders, the Petsmart, the T. J. Maxx. Mr. Janos, 34, said a ''pretty swank'' Home Depot is nearby, but not as nearby as Best Buy, which is just downstairs in their 57-unit condo building, Lincoln Park Commons. The Best Buy, at 30,000 square feet, takes up most of the street level of the building, on a site that once held a Chicago Transit Authority bus barn.

For eons, tradesmen have lived over, under and behind their shops, and apartment buildings in New York City often have street-level shops. But only recently have new combination buildings gone up: apartment blocks plopped on top of superstores. No apartment building sits atop an Ikea, but that may not be far behind.

Unlike a corner grocery store, such stores nearly rival the housing upstairs in square footage. That Frankenstein combination forces architects to dissociate the residential space from the behemoth below.

''People are thrown aback because we're over it,'' Ms. Janos, 32, said of the Best Buy.

As developers combine retailing with residential in cities, the resulting buildings hardly resemble ''lifestyle villages,'' those glorified shopping malls sprouting up in suburbs with condos stacked atop modest-size Pottery Barns and Crate & Barrels, all arrayed around a pretend town square.

The new buildings are more like living above a Macy's or a Bloomingdale's. The Time Warner building at Columbus Circle in New York allows residents to shop at a gargantuan basement-level Whole Foods for a little extra fleur verte -- which beats heading downstairs to a cramped Gristedes.

And just below Bloomingdale's, on the site of the old Alexanders store on Lexington Avenue near 59th Street, an 80,000-square-foot Home Depot will provide the base for a new 55-story apartment tower scheduled for completion early next year. The tower, designed by Cesar Pelli, will have offices for Bloomberg Media as well as 105 condominiums.

''Would Henry Kravis buy a $5 million apartment and say, 'It's right over the Home Depot?' '' Marian McEvoy asked hypothetically. A design editor, Ms. McEvoy lived directly opposite the Alexander site for years before moving to the Hudson River Valley.

But outside New York it might well be acceptable to live above an easily identifiable store. Big-box stores married to residences are appearing in Chicago, Washington, Seattle and San Francisco.

Near downtown San Francisco, a Whole Foods store holds up five floors of apartments in a building called the Aurora. The building's developer, the Bond Companies of Santa Monica, Calif., recently opened 300 apartments at Sunset and Vine in Hollywood over a 90,000-square-foot complex that includes a Borders bookstore and a Bed Bath & Beyond.

But as developers experiment with new mixes of housing and supersize retailing, some people are not sure the gamble will succeed.

As Ronald B. Shipka Sr., principal of the Enterprise Companies, the developer of Lincoln Park Commons, put it, ''You don't make any money on 2,000 or 3,000 square feet'' of retail space -- something like a Starbucks shop and a dry cleaner. But to bring in a larger retailer, he said, ''you have to find the right fit not to be detrimental to the residential sales.'' Even with the right fit, he said, his company has lost money because it has taken four years to sell all the residential units in the building. ''Anytime a developer carries 57 units for four years, something is awry,'' he said.

Residents who can afford to live in such places would definitely not want a restaurant, a bar or a convenience store like a 7-Eleven below them. Until recently, developers considered grocery stores and housing mutually exclusive as well, said Don Milliken, president and chief executive of the Milliken Development Group, which built the TriBeCa in Seattle -- a 51-unit condominium over a deluxe Safeway grocery store.

''All the things that retailers care about are quite different from those that residential developers are focused on,'' Mr. Milliken said, adding that one goal is to make sure that ''residential users aren't fed up with the noise and smells of retail.''

THE movement is being fueled by the increasing difficulty of finding good locations in cities. To satisfy the needs of commuters tired of commuting and bored empty nesters heading back to the cities, big-box retailers are considering even small and marginal lots as building sites, topping them off with housing.

''It's easy to see a bonanza in the making,'' said Richard Longstreth, a professor of American studies at George Washington University and the author of ''City Center to Regional Mall: Architecture, the Automobile and Retailing in Los Angeles, 1920-1950'' (MIT Press, 1997). Young professional singles and couples, he said, increasingly prefer an urban environment.

Cities, in turn, are taking on the trappings of suburbia: the multiplexes, the Starbucks shops and chain stores and the big-box retailers with giant parking garages. Putting them all together is a ''new urbanist'' idea -- mixing living and working spaces -- gone vertical.